Michael Snow is a Toronto born artist known internationally as a painter, sculptor, filmmaker, musician and author. This exhibition celebrates his achievement as the 2011 winner of the Gershon Iskowitz Prize.

Snow has always been a sculptor. "A pure sculptor," he explains, "an artist who makes objects." He makes things to look through, look around, look along, look at, up, down and behind, to look at yourself looking at things. By making vision the subject of the object, the looking activates the object. Looking that sometimes require touch, sometimes invites sitting and sometimes necessitates caution.

"All these works are Directors of Attention in the sense that their forms suggest the paths a spectator's eyes should take," he writes. In the most literal sense, Snow makes visual art: objects for you to see.

The sculptures in Objects of Vision are are abstract-form sculptures from three distinct yet essentially connected moments in the artist's career: the late 1950s, the late 1960s and 1982. The sculptures are instruments in the artist's orchestration of thinking about looking. While each work has a rich exhibition and publication history in varied contexts, they are presented here for the first time as one cohesive and focused investigation of sight and materiality.

The Conservation of Seated Sculpture by Michael Snow

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Named for Michael Snow's 1967 masterpiece Wavelength, Wavelengths is the Toronto International Film Festival’s curated presentation of the best in international avant-garde film and video. This section has expanded to include narrative and documentary features as well as four thematic shorts programmes. This year you can look forward to works by Thomas Demand, Francesca Woodman, William E. Jones, Luther Price, Jean-Paul Kelly, Lonnie van Brummelan & Siebren de Haan, Mati Diop, Gabriel Abrantes, and many more provocative artists and auteurs.

Renowned Toronto artist Michael Snow explores the art of looking at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) with an exhibition celebrating his June 2011 winning of the Gershon Iskowitz Prize. On view from July 18 to Dec. 9 in the AGO’s Signy Eaton Gallery, the exhibition highlights Snow’s continuing contribution to Canadian art and his ongoing investigation into visual perception.

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